posted by:
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Beth Ritsema
on June 7, 2000
at 5:09PM
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subject:
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LATE RESPONSE: POSTED 6/7/2000
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Discussion participants,
Is our three-week discussion almost finished already? Hello, my name is Beth Ritsema. I also am sorry to be joining late. Can we continue awhile yet?
I am one of the principal investigators for the Renewing Mathematics Teaching Through Curriculum (RMTC) LSC based at Western Michigan University. We are in our fourth year of the project and have had similar experiences and thoughts as expressed in the case studies and comments by this group.
Some of the issues that are coming to the surface in the professional development community seem to be a result of the NSF funding for long term professional development for schools. Long term professional development in itself is new to most schools.
The schools in our collaborative are either implementing the Core-Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP) curriculum in high school and/or the Connected Mathematics Project curriculum in the middle school. The Riverside case study most closely resembles our experience.
It seems that much of the difficulty in professional development is the tension between what teachers think they need and the directions a "resource partner" would like to encourage teachers to go. Even when teachers are given the opportunity to help design professional development experiences, if they have not participated in high quality professional development, if they do not recognize constructivist teaching, if they do not recognize student thinking, or as previously discussed if they do not have deep mathematical content knowledge, how can they be expected to design quality professional development or push themselves professionally?
Are we expecting too much from teachers. In our LSC, we have expected that with quality workshops that embed mathematical content learning in a instructional format similar to what we would like to see in their classrooms, teachers classrooms would be transformed. Not so. Visiting classrooms tends to be a depressing experience. Many teachers who "talk the talk", do not seem to really understand that they are not pushing students to think.
It seems that resource partners who develop relationships with a teacher that allows for modeling of teaching and constructive criticism in the teacher's classroom has the greatest potential for helping teachers reflect on their teaching. It can happen within the context of the teacher's day. One problem with this approach is that most resource partners do not have the time to do this one-on-one mentoring. Another problem is that there is often a lack of respect for the resource partner since he/she may not have taught the particular content to students or, in the eyes of the classroom teacher, "understand my students".
(Of course, video and student work have potential as professional development tools also, but quality seems to be lacking - especially for high school mathematics.)
So, to address Kay's question about finding "good" professional developers: Yes, they are hard to find. In fact, I have been finding out how difficult it is to do professional development that has a real impact on classroom teaching myself. I have been approaching the problem of quality pd people by trying to identify and work with selected classroom teachers who seem to have the potential to learn, grow, and have the respect of their colleagues.
In our final year of RMTC, we are going to be working with a Leadership Council made up of a few lead teachers who we hope will be able to continue quality discussions within the 3 geographical regions of our collaborative after the grant ends. We also plan to do more on site mentoring of teachers this year.
The problem is one of gearing up to accommodate the need nationwide. Another one of my hats is as Professional Development Coordinator for the Core-Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP). In that capacity, I am assisting experienced classroom teachers who are doing professional development and also facilitating a Leadership Institute for CPMP consultants who contract themselves to do professional development for districts. In some cases, I would call the work the teachers do "training" not pd, but in other cases, it is quality professional development.
There is a real need for professional development for those of us providing pd or assisting others in providing pd. I have had some opportunities to gather professional development people together and have found that I benefited greatly from the experience. (Harold, I learned much from you. J)
As for fees: I have heard of fees ranging from $350 per day to $800 per day. It depends on quality, supply and demand, and whether there are one or two facilitators.
That is probably more than you wanted to read. If this discussion continues, I will go back to the paper: "Time, and Time Again."
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